Jason Statham on Transporter 3

By the time you get to Transporter 3, you've just dug your own grave. Anything in Transporter 1 is a nice surprise. Then Transporter 2 has to top it. Transporter 3 is just insane, climaxing with Jason Statham crashing into a moving train and kicking bad guy butt.

Jason Statham on Transporter 3

"It's another piece," Statham said nonchalantly. "It's another action sequence. A moving train is never easy to shoot around and obviously, there's certain things that we have to shoot on a green screen, like minimum amounts. There's a lot of the sequence that sometimes you're not in because it's all on Robert [Knepper]. We balance it all out and we try to be well prepared and that's where Luc [Besson] and Olivier [Megaton] get all these action sequences all ready, everyone knows what they're doing already. It's not like we're coming in and trying to work things out. It's all preplanned. We have a rehearsal and it's done so we can shoot it very efficiently whereas you get a lot of the bigger action movies that don't actually get things done in an efficient way like we do. They just cost 50 times more money and don't actually get as good a result as what we get."

Another sequences has Statham diving into a lake after his car, because if it sinks 75 feet below, a proximity bomb will kill him. "I used to do diving years ago but you have to hold your breath for about two seconds. You dive in and you come straight to the surface so I actually learned to scuba dive for the first one with a good friend of Luc's who's probably the best person you could ever learn to scuba dive with. A little bit unorthodox in his teaching techniques, I was thrust into a cave and the mask was ripped off but you gain confidence very, very quickly. It was the best place to learn."

In Transporter 3, even a basic fight scene had to look new and exciting. "It's difficult because we have to try and do something new and you've got Olivier with a trolley with a camera on it, thinking of new ways, new angles and it's difficult how you try and improve on what you've already done and what you haven't already seen in movies that are out there now."

By part three, audience expect a certain character out of Frank Martin, but there was still a little wiggle room. : Well, I think on the third one, we found his weakness and it all lies within this lovely female here. You know, obviously it's about the creative aspects of how we're going to make this one a little bit more interesting. How do you make Frank Martin more vulnerable, and at the same time, you always have to try and exceed what you did in the previous two which is so difficult these days because there's so much to live up to with what Luc created with the character, in fact. So there's always challenges and hopefully we've made this one interesting enough."